Department of Psychology, New York University, United States; NYUAD Institute, New York University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
Department of Psychology, New York University, United States; Department of Linguistics, New York University, United States; NYUAD Institute, New York University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
Neuropsychologia. 2018 Jun;114:77-87. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2018.04.015. Epub 2018 Apr 22.
The field of psycho- and neuro-linguistics has long-debated the decompositional model of visual word processing: Are written words processed via the visual forms of stem and affix morphemes, or as complex wholes? Although many have now settled upon a decompositional view, it is unclear what heuristic the brain uses to generate these visual morpheme-forms in the first place. Here we conduct a magneto-encephalography study to test two hypotheses for how this may be done: i) the brain encodes representations of the morphemes that follow the morpho-syntactic rules governing constituents: A stem morpheme will be represented if the word obeys the grammatical behaviour associated with its suffix; ii) the brain only encodes stem morphemes that occur with multiple suffixes or as words in isolation. Our results indicate that words with morpho-syntactic wellformedness as stem-suffix combinations are decomposed by the system, thus supporting the former hypothesis. This suggests that knowledge of morpho-syntactic rules can be used to form morphological representations of written words, in absence of independent experience with all of their constituent morphemes. Possible mechanisms supporting this computation are discussed.
书面单词是通过词干和词缀形态的视觉形式来处理，还是作为整体来处理？尽管现在许多人已经接受了分解观点，但大脑最初使用什么启发式来生成这些视觉形态仍然不清楚。在这里，我们进行了一项脑磁图研究，以检验两种可能的假设：i）大脑根据支配成分的形态句法规则对词干和词缀形态的表示进行编码：如果单词遵循与其后缀相关的语法行为，就会表示词干形态；ii）大脑只对出现多个后缀或作为孤立单词的词干形态进行编码。我们的结果表明，词干后缀组合具有形态句法合法性的单词会被系统分解，从而支持前一种假设。这表明，即使没有对所有组成形态的独立经验，形态句法规则的知识也可以用于形成书面单词的形态表示。讨论了支持这种计算的可能机制。
